Exhibition Features Recycled Materials

Habit, Sculpture and Wall Pieces, an exhibition of works by Ani Hoover, opens with a reception from 6-8 p.m. on April 7 at the Center Gallery on JCC’s Cattaraugus County Campus in Olean.

The reception is free and open to the public. The exhibition, which runs through May 18, can be seen during gallery hours Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m.-7 p.m. and Friday, 8 a.m.-3 p.m. The gallery is closed on weekends and all college holidays.

The exhibition is co-sponsored by the Cattaraugus County Arts Council and JCC.

The works focus on two of the artist’s longtime passions, recycling and craft making and feature weaving, crocheting, and sewing or sewing with materials gleaned from the waste stream.

As a child, Hoover spent long hours looking through her grandmother’s crocheting magazines as well as intense searches of the house for materials to use for her newest “project.”

For the pieces in the JCC exhibition, Hoover revisited her childhood pastimes of craft making that speaks to both her personal history and a contemporary art making practice. The resulting works include large scale crocheted pieces, quilts made from recycled plastics, weavings of plastic shopping bags, and a flock of delicate tulle fabric “yo-yo’s.”

Hoover is a Buffalo-based professional artist. She began her art career as a painter and earned a BFA in painting at American University and an MFA for painting at Missouri State University. Around 2010 her work began to consist mostly of sculpture, installation, and fiber-based practices. Her process embraces recycled materials and decidedly low-tech methods for creating art.

Hoover’s work is in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Anderson Gallery at the University of Buffalo, and many public and private collections in western New York and around the country.